1/38Here are the humble beginnings of our '73 Camaro project, partially disassembled and hand-stripped with 80-grit on a wheel to nearly bare metal.

It's ludicrous, we know. After buying an $800, clapped-out Camaro, we treated it to the most extensive body massage we've done to a project car in recent years just to paint it satin Army green. It just worked out like that. But along the way, we documented everything to show you exactly how to prep your car for even the highest-gloss finish, because, as Scott Carpenter said, "This thing is so straight, we could have just painted it black." And it probably would have been easier.

Carpenter is the next character you'll meet in the long lineup of guys who made HOT ROD's Project F-Bomb happen. The story began in the Sept. '06 issue with Tom Nelson, the relentless power guy at Nelson Racing Engines who served up 1,500 hp worth of twin-turbo small-block and twisted our arm to shove it into our '73 Camaro. Then, last month, you met tattooed, croaky-voiced fabrication genius Nick Miserendino at Red Zone Race Fab, who set up the Bomb with a jungle-gym rollcage to shield us from the furious power.

Now, there's Carpenter-this month's cover model and a '70s-throwback biker dude with a heart of gold who says "rad" and "gnarly" quite a bit. He worked for Corky's Customs back when that shop was buried in fiberglass dust during the building of the cars for the film Corvette Summer, and Carpenter even set up the righthand drive with a bicycle sprocket and chain that relayed righthand steering in-put back to the stock lefthand column. He's been a staple hot-rodder's body guy around California's San Fernando Valley ever since and has recently been running his own place, Scott's Customs. But then he got hooked up with Nelson, who has a shop just two doors down in the same seedy industrial complex. The guys teamed to create Nelson Supercars, since they'd already been working together to install some Nelson engines into customers' cars and had painted a few along the way-this month's cover cars included. The long-term plan is for Nelson Supercars to build three or four complete cars a year, and the F-Bomb is serial No. 001 in that program.

2/38It's best if some of the major panel replacement is done before powdercoating, so the back sides of the new patch panels can be coated. Our Camaro didn't need new floors or quarters, but Scott Carpenter did repair this hunk of rusted dash at the lower corner of the windshield. He hand-cut and shaped patch panels out of scrap sheetmetal, since stamped replacements are not available. No body filler is added prior to blasting and powdercoating.

For our poor body hero, it was a tough road. This project did not go down in a logical order, as we'd initially scrambled to get the car done in time for last year's Drag Week(tm) event, but didn't make it. The effort involved two months of 24-hour work days, where the car was sent to various other shops during the day then trailered back to Carpenter's where it was rubbed on all night. It didn't come close to the theoretically perfect order of assembling the entire car, completing all the fabrication, testing it, then tearing it all back down for paint. That's an ideal world, not a magazine world. But it explains why the photos appear to show the car in various stages of assembly as the work is completed.

We didn't really know what color the F-Bomb was going to be when Nelson's team first attacked it with 80-grit, 9-inch discs on a power grinder to remove all the paint. Rally Green, perhaps? That was the original hue, though it was hidden under coats of a second green, light blue, silver, and then dark blue. In many cases, cars with original paint don't need to be fully stripped to bare metal to get the new finish to adhere properly, but the rescued junkyard Camaro had so much paint on it that it was chipping off. Also, according to Carpenter, "There's just so much stuff on it that you won't ever get new paint to look straight on top of it. All that buildup makes it wavy, and you can never color-sand it enough. It's just not right." It's usually obvious when a car has too much paint, but if in doubt, you can get thickness checkers, which measure in mils, from pro paint stores.

A typical solution for removing paint is blasting with sand or other popular, less invasive media such as plastic beads, walnut shells, or baking soda. Each of those can be used with various levels of intensity to either remove only the topcoats or to also take out all the old body filler. Carpenter prefers to remove old paint from all the outer surfaces by hand to avoid any possibility of warping panels from the intense blasting that's required to remove as much paint as was stuck to our Camaro. He does, however, strip cars down to nothing and let A&M Sandblasting lightly blast the outer surface and clean the undercarriage, jambs, trunk, and interior with silica sand. The company also removed old body filler, as areas with filler need fresh straightening work anyway, so it doesn't matter if the blasting warps a little metal in those areas.

6/38The passenger-side rocker panel was mashed. Normally, tough dents on rockers can be worked by welding rings to the low spots, hooking them to chains mounted to anchors in the floor, and jacking up the car to pull the dent. This was so mangled, we used a Goodmark replacement, but Carpenter didn't need to use the entire panel and cut out a patch to fit our dent.

The light blasting also leaves an ideal finish for the next step, which is a little unorthodox: The bare shell is thoroughly cleaned and then powdercoated. The entire body, fenders, doors, decklid, inner fenderwells, trunk lid, and hood all get a uniform coat of black powdercoating. Carpenter says, "I don't know why people would be scared of it. If it's done right, the powdercoating adheres to the metal probably better than etching primer, and it's a great base to start block-sanding. The sanded coating lets body filler feather in very well." Also, the process seals any loose blasting media that may be caught in the tightest crevices of the car so that it cannot fall out and get in wet primer or paint later. It's possible to powdercoat a paintable primer, but we used a semigloss black that's a great finish for the underside of the car and for the engine-compartment area if you're building a street or race car rather than a show car. Those areas are easily touched up with satin black paint. It's also neat that the coating gets absolutely everywhere-under the dash, under the package tray, and in every corner of the trunk-and into places where it might otherwise be difficult to add a rust-preventive coating, especially if the car has been dipped rather than blasted. The drawbacks are expense (about $1,800 for our car, including blasting) and the fact that the baking process can be hot enough to make factory lead filler drip a bit, though there was no issue with that on our Camaro. Also, we really should have done the coating after all the fabrication work so the welders did not have to grind off the nasty stuff before welding and so the 'cage would have also been coated rather than painted.

The smooth, satin-black finish got us to thinking-about black-and then about satin. The car immediately looked like a hot rod. You could almost stop there, if that's the vibe you were looking for and if the car were straight enough.

7/38Carpenter's method for securing patch panels is to plug-weld (arrow A) a metal flange (arrow B) around the perimeter of the cutout opening. This flange is made from material that's thicker than the surrounding skin of the car. The patch can then be shaped and positively located by screwing it to the flange. After tack-welding around the perimeter of the patch, the screws are removed and then the entire area can be ground flat and smoothed with body filler.

But ours wasn't. The stripping revealed lots of dents. At least the floors and trunk were totally rust free, since the junk was from Arizona (sorry again, rust-belters), and rot was limited to the bottom of one quarter, the corner of the dash where the windshield leaked, and the bottoms of both fenders. Actually, the fenders turned out to be hamburger. The driver side had been patched with fiberglass and chicken wire, and the passenger side was just plain ruined. Carpenter had an old fender that he cut up for a driver-side patch panel, but the other fender was replaced with an all-new unit from Goodmark Industries.

By the time the body was stripped and coated, it had not yet been to Red Zone for any rollcage work, but we had to think ahead. We knew the 'cage was going to include subframe connectors as well as down bars that tied to the car's front suspension subframe. That meant that once 'caged, the factory subframe, which was designed to be unboltable and ever so slightly adjustable, was never going to move again. Since the subframe locates the radiator support, which also helps hang the fenders, which dictate the positions of the inner fenderwells, it all had to be installed and aligned before any of the rollcage work could be done. After locking the subframe in place with Moroso solid aluminum bushings, we found that a Goodmark lower valance was also needed to perfectly line up all the body seams in the front clip.

Carpenter is a stickler for that stuff. In fact, another reason the front clip was completely installed was because he works hard to get perfect gaps at all the edges of the doors, hood, and decklid. Most aftermarket fenders, ours included, don't perfectly line up with the door, and Carpenter fixed that by welding a piece of 11/48-inch rod down the length of the trailing edge of the fender then grinding and filling it into shape to create a uniform gap.

Finally, having the front clip installed allowed Carpenter to start his body-straightening work with all the panels aligned so he could dial in the body lines. That began with the very first block-sanding efforts on the fresh powdercoating, as he attacked the car with hand blocks, long boards, and DA sanders, all loaded with 80-grit paper for a rough-up of the powdercoated surface. Immediately, the high and low areas revealed themselves in the texture of the sanded surface, well before the first coat of primer.

11/38Similarly, here is the same dash repair we showed you earlier. It's now readied for body filler with tape protecting the dashpad and also marking the break-over line. The filler was first applied and shaped on the top, then, after drying, the tape was moved and the bottom half was done. That process helps maintain the shape of the body line.

And so the metalwork began. Our Camaro, which seemed so sano through the goggles of an $800 price tag, proved to have little dents and dings just about everywhere. The roof looked like the thing had been parked at the far end of a driving range, and the lefthand rocker panel had been smashed, probably by a forklift, and needed surgical replacement with a donor panel from Goodmark. In addition to dent repair, Carpenter also called for the retirement of the car's rear valance, under the bumper. He welded in a new one from Year One.

Carpenter really has no fear of body filler, and many body guys today don't either. The stuff is of better quality than it was years ago, and the bad stigma is diminishing. Not that you just slop on the mud and start carving a new Camaro out of it, but you can certainly skim-coat stuff pretty liberally. Carpenter uses an Evercoat brand called Rage Gold-a premium, lightweight, fiberglass-reinforced, very smooth product (PN 100112)-and has found that it has minimal porosity issues and isn't prone to shrinking or cracking. "It's the only stuff to use," he says. The standard procedure involves prepping the dented surface with 80-grit paper, mixing the filler with hardener, and using a plastic spreader tool to smooth the material into the areas that need surfacing. Once the filler is hard (15-20 minutes), the excess is ground off with a cheese grater and the area is rough-shaped with 80-grit then fine-tuned with 150-grit. The sanding steps are handled with either DA power sanders, power long boards, hand blocks, or small wooden dowels and dipsticks, depending on the nature of the shape of the repair.

12/38When using body filler, Carpenter advises, "When you are first shaping it with the grater, make sure to leave enough filler behind so that you can shape the area with the 80-grit on the block, and don't forget that you may remove even more with the 150-grit. That's the mistake 90 percent of guys make the first time: removing so much that they sand too far and have to add filler a second or third time." This photo shows rough-shaping with a grater.

The process of dent straightening and filling went on pretty much forever, and then one night there was the glorious moment when the F-Bomb got its first coat of primer. We bought all PPG products for the job, including NCP280 primer surfacer along with the DT870 reducer and NCX285 hardener that's used with the primer. Carpenter does not use an etching primer, since he trusts the bond of the powdercoating and filler, so the only priming step is with a high-build surfacer. He says the NCP280 is a really high-quality, high-solids primer that's both hard and smooth.

The PPG product sheets say the NCP280 "can be used over sanded, original finishes and properly prepared, cleaned bare metal" and that it can be used over body filler. Mixing instructions are on the cans, though Carpenter prefers to over-reduce the primer a tiny bit to make it flow more smoothly. His gun is a gravity-feed SATAJet NR 2000 HVLP setup with a 1.5 tip and 10 psi at the cap. He uses it for everything except some very heavy metallic paints but warns that the ideal tip (usually 1.3, 1.4, or 1.5 mm) can depend on how paint is mixed. In general, Carpenter likes to over-reduce materials by a couple of percentage points so they spray fairly wet.

The first coat of primer was added only after all the bodywork was completed. We used PPG's DX330 wax and grease remover, thoroughly masked the car, wiped it down again with the DX330, and finally watched as Carpenter shot two coats of primer, waiting 10 minutes between coats. It would be four hours before the block-sanding could ensue, but the glossy, wet coat of light gray primer told us the car was very straight.

13/38The lower rear valance also had to be replaced due to lots of prior mangling with a slide hammer. This time, the replacement came via Year One.

And that's about the time we started dreaming of Lamborghini orange that's becoming so popular. The guys around Nelson's still weren't digging the thought of Army green.

The next few weeks consisted of plenty more block-sanding sessions separated by the repair of little dents that kept creeping up as the car was transported to other shops during daylight hours. In all, the body was primed and sanded four separate times. Carpenter likes crisp body lines, and he usually marks them with tape and sands to the tape, first from the top, then from the bottom, to enhance the razor straightness of the car's shape. With every sanding episode, more and more imperfections are narrowed down and eliminated, sometimes with paper alone, other times with Evercoat glaze, and with Rage Gold filler for the deeper nastiness. Finally, an even coat of primer brought an end to the repair sessions and was ultimately prepped with a thorough sanding using 400-grit wet paper. Carpenter advises that wet-sanding the primer with 400-grit is good for solid colors but that metallics-especially silver-require further wet-sanding with 600- or even 1,000-grit. Wet-sanding may reveal some tiny divots in the surface, and ours were filled with little dabs of glaze from a plastic spreader and resanded with 400.

14/38Here's the car with nearly all the bodywork complete on top of the powdercoat. The decklid fit well and was blocked and primed off the car. After sanding it all with 150-grit on a DA, then masking, degreasing, and tack-ragging, it was ready for its first coat of NCP280 primer.

It was then that Carpenter declared maybe one more day of block-sanding could give us a surface that was ready for a deep-black paint job. He kind of pressured us about it, actually. But behind the scenes, we'd been messing with satin green, mixing and testing a bunch of colors on used sheetmetal. They were met mostly with groans of rejection until we finally hit it. We liked our custom color, which the guys called F'ing Green. Two different paint companies hated it and refused to sponsor us because of it. Even so, Nelson finally thought we were onto something. He put the heat on Carpenter to try it. Worst case, the ugly green could be sanded, primed, and topped with black.

Not. The body went into the booth and up on jackstands, and after the most thorough cleaning, masking, degreasing, and tack-ragging yet, it was hit with a coat of DuPont's 222S adhesion promoter. That's a precaution that Carpenter always takes to ensure the paint sticks as well as possible. And, finally, Carpenter laid down a flawless sheen of our custom-mixed color. The car entered the booth as just another Camaro and exited as the F-Bomb. We were onto something wicked lookin'. The team woke up, excited about the prospect of carrying through a theme no one had dared before. And then it all came crashing down. As it turns out, flat or semigloss finishes aren't quite as easy as they look.

15/38The Camaro was primed four times in all. In between coats of primer, minor dents were discovered and repaired, but most of the work was in block-sanding day and night. The first coat was blocked with 150-grit paper, the second coat got 220-grit, the third coat was rubbed with 320-grit, and finally the fourth layer of primer was wet-sanded with 400-grit. Metallic paints can require wet-sanding with primer with 600- or even 1,000-grit.

There are a few ways to achieve the suede look that's now so popular. One is to leave the car in primer, with PPG DP90 black being the common choice. The trouble with primer is that it is not UV protected and eventually turns chalky, plus it's penetrable by water and will rust from underneath. Those are the same problems with the second option, which is to use only the basecoat of a paint that's really designed for clearcoat. That's often seen when a nongloss metallic paint is desired. Another choice is to use single-stage paint mixed with a flattening agent, such as PPG's DX265 for acrylic enamels or DX685 for urethane paints. It will take some experimentation to determine the best mix of flattener to use with your particular paint to achieve the sheen you want.

Then there's the final choice, which is to use a flattened clear. We like this option because it provides UV protection and is more cleanable than the other semigloss options, though it still fingerprints just as easily. Semigloss clears can be made by adding flattening agents, but you'll get a less cloudy finish by starting with a clearcoat that's premixed for low gloss. We used PPG 2060 Flexed 'n' Flat, a urethane clear that's designed for low-sheen finishes on the flexible body cladding of newer cars.

Our first whack with the Flexed 'n' Flat was flawless, with Carpenter working his mojo to adjust the reducer mixture, gun pressure, and spraying technique to leave a perfect finish with two coats of clear. We were high-fiving in the booth. Then we decided to add one more coat. And it was cloudy and patchy. Ruined. No one in the shop would even eat a pizza or drink a beer. Carpenter was devastated and had to go work out some aggressions on the Harley for a while. He came back days later, annoyed but clearheaded, and prepped the entire car again, this time smoothing the surface with wet 600-grit. More cleaning. More degreasing. Endless masking. He wasn't going to lose again. He'd worked out the problem in his head, and this time he was workin' the serious paint-guy Kung Fu. He disappeared into the booth alone and emerged victorious.

16/38Between each primer coat, the whole car needs to be remasked and cleaned. Tack rags, available from paint stores, lift lint and small particles, and it's especially important to clean out between tight body seams. That was our job.

The secret? The semigloss clear needed to go on wet and slow. Earlier, we'd gotten lucky on a couple of coats, but it had been sprayed with too fast a reducer-one designed for the cool weather we'd been experiencing during midnights in October. The clear was drying too soon, leaving patches. Instead, Carpenter mixed up a slow, hot-weather reducer then put down the Flexed 'n' Flat very wet using all his voodoo to prevent drips. The two heavy coats tended to self-level and dry slowly, leaving a uniform eggshell finish after a long wait with fingers crossed. It really took two days in the sun for it to be as hard as we wanted. It had to be perfect-since you can't color-sand or easily touch up the satin finish-and it was.

We later asked Troy Trepanier how he achieved the satin finish on Blowfish (HRM, Feb. '07), and he told us he prefers the similar flattened product from Glasurit. Regardless, we were in the clear, so to speak. It was all glory from here on out. The F-Bomb vibe came on quickly, with all the trim painted F'ing Green and the wheels anodized clear black. The bumpers, air dam, spoiler, taillight panel, and hood stripe were all done in SEM semigloss black basecoat, with Carpenter not wanting to let the sharp black get muddy underneath the clear.

And finally, the kill: WWII-inspired nose art hand-painted by Paul Adams (page 100). We Dared To Be Different and lived to tell about it. As we pushed the car onto the trailer for the SEMA show, with sanding boogers still fresh in our sleepless nostrils, we knew that, love it or hate it, the F-Bomb was a car no one would forget.

23/38Carpenter also painted and buffed both of this month's cover cars. The Mustang is really the same blue as the Pontiac; we changed it to red on the cover because it had better contrast.

Every bodywork, sanding, and priming step we've shown you in this story applies to painting a car with shiny paint. The only difference is that, with a slick finish, you need to color-sand it to perfection and then buff it to a gloss. In a sense, it's easier than semigloss paint because you can sand out some imperfections.

Carpenter suggests that if you want stripes under the shiny clearcoat, you should first lay down the basecoat, then add the stripes, then add a coat or two of clear. The clear will have a raised edge around the stripes because they have more material on the surface than the basecoat alone. This edge can be block-sanded flat with wet 600-grit, and then further coats of clear can be used to get the surface mirror smooth. You can wet-sand every coat of clear to get it perfect.

Then there's the color-sanding of the final coat. Whether you have single-stage paint or a clearcoat, Carpenter says that heavily textured finishes, such as with metalflake or if you have a lot of orange peel, can be cut first with wet 600-grit, then you can progress to 800, 1,000, or 1,500. He told us, "If the surface is pretty rough, you might wet-sand it with 600-grit and it will look good, but then you buff it out and you can still see texture. That's why you need to use the finer paper after the 600."

With nonmetallic surfaces or very smooth spray jobs, you may be able to start wet-sanding with 800 or 1,000 before you move to 1,500, or to 2,000 if you really want perfection.

For buffing, Carpenter prefers not to ever use wool pads: "Those are for saving old, dead paint that needs a lot of cutting. Wool puts in swirls that you then have to try and take out. I always use foam pads, even with the compound. In fact, if the pad is new, I rough it up and soften it by running it against the edge of a screwdriver or a cleaning wheel. Otherwise, they have sharp edges that can dig in too much." He follows up with machine glaze on a softer foam pad then hand glaze on a soft towel.

The crowning touch to the F-Bomb is the fender graphics inspired by World War II airplane nose art. We wanted it to be cartoony fun and sort of legit in the sense that it would be roughly hand-painted in the same way the WWII guys would have done their bombers. We wanted brush strokes and everything, which is why the art is on top of the clearcoat rather than under it.

We found the perfect guy to handle this for us: Kiwi Paul Adams of Anarchy Graphics. He normally does everything from shop signs and simple lettering to kustom-themed art to wild speedboat graphics. It was fascinating to watch him make the F-Bomb come to life. Here's how that went.